Mina the Hollower Devs Hope to Balance Classic Feel with Modern Technology

gamerant.com:

Although video games have come a long way from their 8-bit heritage, classic titles still enjoy a loyal fanbase today. That enduring appeal was something Yacht Club Games aimed to capture in their forthcoming release Mina the Hollower, which the studio says is a homage to the handheld games of old.

Although Mina was inspired by nostalgia for the Game Boy era, Yacht Club was aware of classic handheld games’ limitations. Game Rant spoke with the studio’s marketing lead Celia Schilling about the title’s key gameplay mechanics, and how the developers struck a careful balance between a retro aesthetic and contemporary features.

Mina the Hollower Dev Yacht Club Games Has Room to Expand With Over $1 Million from Kickstarter

Mina is set in a Gothic universe, inspired largely by 1986’s Castlevania, Schilling said. Some of the game’s features also take notes from both classic and contemporary titles like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and even Bloodborne.

“[T]he game also took inspirations from Gothic-era writings like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein,” Schilling said. The devs liked those worlds in particular, since they center around “a horrific descent from normality into something dark and spooky.” Yacht Club’s writers are leaning into those darker tones, Schilling said.

Gamers got a preview of that spooky vibe in Mina’s demo. The player meets a character called the Duke who enlists them to help find his lover, the Duchess. At the end of the quest, it’s revealed that the player has been leading the Duke to a coffin and that the Duchess has actually been dead the whole time. “At first it seems like a fun fetch quest,” Schilling said, “but it becomes sad.”

Meanwhile, players who take control